WWII

John Butterfield, with whom I shared an office for a time at SPI, has long since gone onto an impressive career as an interactive designer, but in the late 70s and early 80s, he designed a whole series of games for SPI, Victory Games, and West End Games. Among them was RAF, which we published when I was running all game development efforts for West End. He has greatly reworked and improved the game for this new edition from Decision Games.

According to the sell copy for Turning the Tide, in January 1945 "The Nazis' march towards total world domination is gathering pace". Which should tell you right off the bat this is an arcade shmup, evidently created by people who are historically illiterate. (The turning point was in 1942, with Stalingrad and Midway; in January 1945, the Bulge is extinguishing the Germans' last hope of stopping the Western Allies, the Russians are rolling relentlessly toward Berlin, and the Japanese are beginning to starve.)

Grey Ranks is an indie, limited duration, narrativist tabletop RPG set during the Warsaw uprising of 1944 against the Nazis.

To recap the history: the Polish resistance, which owed allegiance to the British-supported Polish government in exile, rose in 1944 as Soviet troops invested eastern Poland and advanced toward Warsaw. Soviet troops halted their advance scant kilometers from Warsaw, and waited until the Nazis had utterly destroyed the uprising, advancing only afterward, ultimately installing their own puppet Communist regime. The British and Americans asked Stalin permission to use airstrips behind Soviet lines to airdrop supplies to the Poles, and were refused. Stalin thus gained twice; the resistance injured the Germans, and the Germans wiped out any possibility of organized Polish resistance to the establishment of a Soviet-controlled regime in Poland.

I'm a fan of strategic-level World War II games, and I've played any number, starting with the old World War II from SPI.

Like Strategic Command: European Theater, Commander - Europe at War uses a hex map, is turn-based, and is limited to the European theater. In general, I tend to think that hex-based wargames are humorous--we adopted hexes for boardgames because they provide a better tessellation of territory than a square grid, but computers are quite capable of calculating true distances trivially, so to my mind, the use of hexes in digital games has always been a technologically unnecessary homage to an earlier non-digital style. (Of course, one might say the same of provinces.)

Making History reminds me of the games from Paradox, most famously Europa Universalis. That's a bit of a paradox (hem hem), because Paradox has its own (excellent) WWII game, Hearts of Iron -- but HoI is very much a war game, and while military conflict is central to Making History, the war side of the game is much more abstracted, and at a more grand strategic level, and it pays much more attention to economics and diplomacy.

Devil's Brigade Lux is apparently a promotion for some kind of TV show (people still watch TV, I'm told) about the First Special Services Force (aka the "Devil's Brigade"), a joint Canadian-US unit that served in Italy (and the largely irrelevant thrust into Southern France post-D-Day) in the Second World War.

But more importantly, from my perspective, it's another excellent Risk-like game from Sillysoft, who also created Lux Delux and Ancient Empires Lux -- but unlike those games, it's utterly free, since the ostensible purpose is to promote this TV show thingie.

A bunch of levels (not sure how many, as I haven't played through the whole thing as yet) Only one level that recreate the a battles faced by the FSSF -- and yes, this is Risk, so if you're looking for detailed simulations of the Italian Campaign at an operational level, this isn't it -- but hey, the historical tie lends some interest, and the actual gameplay is fun.

And who can argue with that?

If you're looking for an Allied alternative to the old Panzer Commander simulation, this isn't it. But for a budget arcade game featuring tanks, you could do a lot worse than WWII Tank Commander. And let's face it: there aren't many games on this subject these days, particularly on the PC. It just might be what you need to get that arcade aficionado to move past fantasy or first person shooters long enough to take a tank for a test spin....

During the Second World War, British intelligence believed that, once the Germans defeated the Polish Army, the Nazi forces would easily outnumber the combined Franco-British units on the Western Front. Estimates indicated that the German strength on the Western Front was currently circa 60 divisions to the combined 88 divisions in France (72 French divisions of regular army, 4 British divisions of land units, and 12 divisions of fortress garrisons). The combined force was not quite enough to warrant a direct assault across the by-now refortified Rhineland, but the story was to become worse with the surrender of Poland. With up to 40 divisions transferred from the Eastern Front, this would enable Germany to actually outnumber the Allies by 12 divisions. This combined with the Luftwaffe's superiority in planes (circa 2,000 compared to 950 for the French and British alliance), had to seem ominous. [Figures gleaned from Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, p. 480.]

Doing the Impossible

Today, first-person shooters take millions of dollars, years, and huge teams to develop, right? It's just impossible for a lone-wolf developer to create an FPS that's compelling.

Well, maybe not--if you concentrate on innovative gameplay instead of polygon count and particle effects. That's what Rune Trollebo has done.